Get HTML code from a website

[ryan0204]

Say I wanted to get the html code from www.something.com/file.html and have it shown in a textbox, what would be the best way to do this in vb.net? With VB6 i was just using inet.openurl but I don't think that's available in vb.net.

[Negative0]

Dim wc As New System.Net.WebClient
        Dim objStream As System.IO.Stream
        Dim sr As System.IO.StreamReader
        objStream = wc.OpenRead("http://www.google.com/microsoft.html")
        sr = New IO.StreamReader(objStream)
        Dim s As String
        s = sr.ReadToEnd
        MsgBox(s)

[ryan0204]

thanks for the code

[ryan0204]

One problem that I found is if the website is down, the whole program will hang at the wc.OpenRead("http:/www.something.com"l) line. Is there anyway to add a timeout to it to make it stop trying to get the page after 10 secs?

[Pirate]

Originally posted by ryan0204
One problem that I found is if the website is down, the whole program will hang at the wc.OpenRead("http:/www.something.com"l) line. Is there anyway to add a timeout to it to make it stop trying to get the page after 10 secs?

That's easy . You just catch that error and it won't hang . You don't need a timer or anything . It throw an exception if anything wrong happened .

[ryan0204]

How would I go about doing that? I tried this:

        Try
            objStream = wc.OpenRead(sUrl)
        Catch
            MsgBox(Err.Description)
        End Try

and it still just hangs.

[ryan0204]

The problem is that I need it to stop trying to get the webpage after a certain amount of seconds have passed. Without something like that it takes almost a minute before it will timeout and generate an error. I can't use a timer because while its trying to get the webpage, the whole form is frozen up.

[Pirate]

See if this helps !!
http://www.developer.com/net/vb/article.php/3113371

[ryan0204]

Thanks pirate. That one works better than the first one and timesout quicker, but it doesn't seem to accept the timeout property being passed in. If I call it with a 10 second timeout, it takes about 30 seconds before it actually timesout.

[dynamic_sysop]

why don't you use the InternetCheckConnection Api to see if the website is actually there ( connected ) , eg:

Private Declare Function InternetCheckConnection Lib "wininet.dll" Alias "InternetCheckConnectionA" (ByVal lpszUrl As String, ByVal dwFlags As Int32, ByVal dwReserved As Int32) As Int32
 
    Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
        Dim strurl As String = TextBox1.Text
            If InternetCheckConnection(strurl, &H1, 0) Then
                Dim Request As HttpWebRequest = DirectCast(WebRequest.Create(strurl), HttpWebRequest)
                Dim Response As HttpWebResponse = DirectCast(Request.GetResponse(), HttpWebResponse)
                Dim istream As New IO.StreamReader(Response.GetResponseStream)
                MessageBox.Show(istream.ReadToEnd)
                Response.Close()
            Else
                MessageBox.Show("invalid url specified")
            End If
    End Sub

[ryan0204]

good idea, i'll give that a try.